


Sic Itur Ad Astra

by ClockworkCourier



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canonical Character Death, F/M, First Kiss, Headcanon, One Shot, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 14:44:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8988592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkCourier/pseuds/ClockworkCourier
Summary: Jyn Erso, unsurprisingly, turned everything he believed about himself and the galaxy right on its head; what was right, what was wrong, and what to do about it. It was all different because of her, and he couldn’t help but feel something like a sinking sensation in his chest when he realized that. He didn’t accept it, though. Not without a mark. Not without a reason.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [rolls in and offers this ask box prompt because I am weak and can't resist soulmate tropes]
> 
> [promptly rolls back out]
> 
> Title is Latin, meaning "thus one journeys to the stars". Coincidentally, this is also going to be my next tattoo.

Cassian Andor didn’t think he had a soulmate, for a few reasons.   


First and foremost, of all of the marks on his skin, none were particularly interesting or notable. He only ever checked in moments of rare privacy, or in the light of some distant moon on a mission. He knew that some people swore by one on their skin, like Davik Reddan who swore up and down that the small oblong splotch on his right calf was, without a doubt, the same mark on his soulmate. Elsie Qa’alla matched hers with her future soulmate who happened to be in her battalion when both of them had their blaster arms extended in a firefight and thus exposed a linear stripe of caf-colored skin on their underarm. And so that was it. Weird speckles, splotches, sometimes precise geometric figures like a tattoo, and Cassian had nothing.    


Second, he never believed he would live long enough to find his soulmate anyway. Raised with a blaster in his hand and a poison pill in his jacket, Cassian always operated under the impression that since his sixth birthday, his life expectancy was incredibly short. He figured that out about two years later, a few days after he turned eight, when he discovered that an ice chunk in an Imperial tank engine could sometimes short the entire thing out if placed in the right spot. The debris from the explosion almost killed him. When he managed to dodge that, a red-hot blast from a stormtrooper grazed his left shoulder. The burn brought tears to his eyes, but he had swallowed them down, steeled himself, and marched back to the base with his teeth gritted and a realization far too advanced for any eight year old to think.   


He was going to die young.   


Third, he supposed, was that he didn’t think he was cut out for any relationship that required commitment. Not to say he wasn’t a committed person, because loyalty was certainly one of his better traits. The problem was that he was never in one place for long. If he sat still for any extended period of time, it was only a matter of moments before the specters of his past would begin to set in. Between nightmares full of exposed bone and blood-soaked duracrete and echoes of screams that would ring in his head if a room got too quiet, Cassian found out fairly early on that so long as he was occupied with a task, the ghosts couldn’t catch him.   


At age twelve, he started running, and he hadn’t stopped since. That didn’t make for the best image of promises and something like matrimony. When he did have any sort of tryst with anyone, he always slunk away from it feeling guilty, and so had decided to put a stop to that.   


In short, he didn’t have a mark, he couldn’t commit properly, and he was going to die young. All in all, it was better to just ignore the whole institution completely than to pretend he could manage it.   


Still, quiet moments happened no matter what. There would inevitably be a lull in a mission, or a long trip where the hum of the ship he was on would make him drowsy and bring him into an unwanted headspace. Then, he would remember those brief flashes of his childhood when everything wasn’t falling apart and no one was dead yet. He could remember the mark like a flame-shaped burn on his mother’s left hand, and the matching one on his father’s.    


“It suits her,” his father had intoned to him, grinning wide with his eyes glittering from the sun catching the snows and ice of Fest. “She’s a fiery one.”   


“Funny,” his mother had jabbed back. Her left arm had encircled Cassian, holding him up on her lap. His memory blurred there, and he couldn’t remember where they were or what they were looking at. If he tried to push, he could only see the fires of battle and the looming shape of an Imperial destroyer. It was easier to just skim it, to have one of those rare moments where he could hear their voices and see their faces.    


His mother and father had found each other easily, he remembered. His father said she was a flame in the middle of the ices of Fest, and it would have been harder to lose her.    


“One day, Cassian,” his father told him, seemingly only days before his death in battle. “You’ll find them. Wherever they are, if it’s a distant moon or the farthest star, they’ll be there.”   


Cassian wanted to believe him, the way he always wanted to believe everything he or his mother ever said.   


_ You’ll always have me, _ said his mother.  _ Here, _ she pointed to his head.  _ Or here, _ to his heart.   


_ Stay strong, Cassian, _ said his father.  _ Stay strong. _ _  
_

In those quiet moments, when no one could see, and when Cassian closed his eyes so he couldn’t see either, he would bring his left hand up to his heart, where his mother promised she would be.   


And damn if he didn’t try to be strong.   


—   


If there was a distant moon, it was Yavin 4. If there was a far star, then her name was Jyn Erso.    


Cassian wanted to think he was wrong. After the council meeting, after he looked her in the eyes and told her she was home, he wanted so badly to think that he was lying to himself.    


But they circled each other in  _ that _ way. Two like magnets repelled certain parts of them, the parts that matched in a way too painfully similar. But something else drew them together, brought him in so close that he wanted to push it away out of instinct.    


_ Nothing matches, _ he thought while the rest of the pilots and personnel started working with Bodhi to figure out the rest of the plan. Cassian had perched himself on a munitions crate and glared down accusingly at his left hand, like his parents’ mark would magically appear there. He wanted to assume that she had someone, but Jyn’s track record made it seem like that wasn’t likely. The girl launched herself into danger on whims and guesses, which had definitely given Cassian a cardiac workout more than twice now. That wasn’t the behavior of someone who had someone else waiting for them.

At least, that’s what Cassian believed, since he worked in a very similar way.    


He also didn’t want to believe it because Scarif was a suicide mission. Going almost alone onto an Imperial-dominated planet was a death sentence, which Cassian was fairly familiar with. Normally, he would have just gone along without another thought. He had operated as an informant in Imperial territory before, reporting directly to an officer who believed him to be Imperial as well. Every second was a close call with death, and the situation on Scarif was no different.   


Except for the fact that despite his desperate hope that he was wrong, his common sense and far more base instinct told him that he was  _ very _ right. He and Jyn Erso, in some way, were made for each other. There might not have been a matching mark on them to say so, but the sensation was there. Chirrut might have called it something that had to do with the Force, and Cassian found himself close to agreeing. It was a tug, or a ripple, or maybe the Force trying its best to smash the two of them together like colliding atoms.    


But if that were the case (damn it), then it meant that they might not come back. He would never know what they could have been, or small things like how she took her caf or her nervous tics or what she named her toys as a child, or silly, stupid things like that. It was strange, considering that he was Captain Cassian Andor, with a long list of assassinations and lives ruined at his hands. Small things shouldn’t have mattered, and he should never have cared if he met the love of his life or not.   


Jyn Erso, unsurprisingly, turned everything he believed about himself and the galaxy right on its head; what was right, what was wrong, and what to do about it. It was all different because of her, and he couldn’t help but feel something like a sinking sensation in his chest when he realized that. 

He didn’t accept it, though. Not without a mark. Not without a reason.   


—   


If he tried, he could imagine that the light on the horizon was just the oncoming dawn. It was warm, and it glowed like sunlight. He turned just enough to see the light play on the strands of Jyn’s hair and brighten her already vibrant eyes. Dirty, injured, and exhausted, she had never looked more beautiful than right at that second.   


She had asked him something in the elevator, with his arm around her shoulders and her arm securely on his waist.   


“Do you regret any of it?” she asked, her voice uncharacteristically soft as they watched flickers of Scarif and the Death Star through the slots.   


“Not really,” he said honestly. Then, quieter, “I think.”   


“You think?”   


“I might have done a few things different.”   


He knew she was smiling, even though it was too dark to see. “Like what?”   


“Not like I could help it, but I might have taken your advice sooner.”   


“Oh?”   


He smiled tiredly and tilted his head so his cheek rested against the crown of her head. Her hair was soft on his skin, and he wondered what it would have been like to wake up to that in the morning, to run his fingers through it and to watch her wake as he did it.    


“Doing the right thing because it’s right,” he replied softly. “I didn’t do enough of that.”   


She might have laughed, or it could have been a contained sob. It was impossible to tell. “You did your best,” Jyn said.   


He shook his head, which ended up more of a nuzzle than anything. “I didn’t, but thank you.” Then, after a moment, “What about you?”   


“If I regret anything?”   


“Mmhmm.”   


She sniffed and shifted her weight so she leaned a little more against him. He couldn’t ignore how comfortable it felt to be beside her so closely, even though the rest of him was in various states of pain.    
  
“It’s going to sound stupid,” she finally said.   


“Nothing sounds stupid right now.”   


“What if I said I regretted not punching Krennic off the platform?”   


“Still not stupid. I would have done the same.”   


She  _ did _ laugh that time. “There’s one regret. But no, I…” She trailed off and sniffed again, using her left hand to hastily wipe at her eyes. If Cassian didn’t think his semi-good arm wasn’t broken, he would have done it for her. “Did you ever think about your soulmate?”   


“I didn’t have one,” he said, but something in him told him that was a lie.   


“Me either,” she said, and it sounded like a painful confession. “Saw said that there wasn’t time for that kind of thing. I always felt like I missed my chance. I just… I saw how happy my parents were at one point, and how my mother couldn’t leave my father and it just…”   


Her voice fell silent, and this time, he knew she was crying. He felt the same to a degree, except his was limited to a dull soreness in his chest.    


Cassian cleared his throat and tried to smile again. “You didn’t have a mark?”   


“I do,” she admitted. He felt her left hand move to a spot behind her left ear. “Someone said I have this starburst mark behind my ear. I figured that might have been it. I’ve never been shot there or anything.”   


“Oh.” Part of him was a little disappointed. Then again, no one had ever come up to tell him that he had a mark on a part of him that he couldn’t see.   


“Do you have one?”   


He would have shrugged if it didn’t hurt so bad. “I don’t know.”   


She laughed quietly, “Do you want me to check?”   


“Oh, sure,” he said, and he laughed as well.   


When the elevator doors opened and light spilled across them, he could see Jyn turn her head, reaching up just enough to get him to tilt his head down. “Okay, let me s–”   


She went quiet immediately, her fingers hovering just above the spot behind his ear.   


He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to, and neither did she. All he felt was her fingers gently trailing down a certain spot, almost reverently like she was handling some holy relic.   


Then, so soft he could barely hear it, “There you are.”   


He felt lighter than air right then, like every pain in his body was null and void. Nothing could hurt him, and nothing could hurt her.    


That led them to stare out at the dawn of the end of Scarif, a flex of Imperial muscle that signaled their end and the beginning of the legend of Rogue One. Cassian believed their mission was a success, that the plans had been transmitted and there would come a day when peace would reign over the galaxy again.    


As for himself, he had found peace where he least expected it.   


Their last moment was a quiet one. In the lull, he didn’t find a single ghost or echo. All he found was Jyn Erso in his arms, and he in hers. Her lips pressed against his, against the corner of his mouth, his cheek, up and up to the mark behind his ear, the matching star to hers.   


_ You’ll always have me, _ said his mother. In his head, and in his heart, he knew that was true.    


_ Stay strong, _ said his father. And Cassian had been strong up to the end.   


“I love you,” said Jyn Erso, to the mark on his skin, to him, to the lifetime they wouldn’t have together, but the eternity that belonged to them fully.   


Then, to her, to the brilliant burst of silver skin behind her ear, to the enormity and massive brilliance of Jyn, the woman that changed him so completely and changed the galaxy as well, he said, “I love you too.”   


In the blaze of burning light, of a planet-killer, of their deaths, he found her in the Force, and faced three truths as to why he had a soulmate.   


First, he had a mark. He had a speckle of stardust behind his left ear, and he could feel her lips and her breath on it still, carrying those feelings with him.   


Second, he did die young. He was twenty-six years old when he died, and she was twenty-one. But he could have been six years old, or sixty, or six hundred, and it wouldn’t have mattered another second.   


Third, he committed. He held Jyn Erso in his arms and felt her warmth and the gravity of their bond, and knew that this was the kind of thing that was forever.    


And there went Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso, and the shores of Scarif, and the crew of Rogue One. The Force was as gentle as an ocean wave, sweeping the whole affair into the stars. 


End file.
